The Nobel Prize in physics is going to Kao, Boyle and Smith

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm, has decided to award the Nobel Prize in physics for 2009 with one half to Charles K. Kao, Standard Telecommunication Laboratories, Harlow, UK, and Chinese University of Hong Kong 'for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication' and the other half jointly to Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, USA 'for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit - the CCD sensor.'

Charles Kuen Kao, British and US citizen. Born 1933 in Shanghai, China. Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering 1965 from Imperial College London, UK. Director of Engineering at Standard Telecommunication Laboratories, Harlow, UK. Vice-chancellor, Chinese University of Hong Kong. Retired 1996.

Willard Sterling Boyle, Canadian and US citizen. Born 1924 in Amherst, NS, Canada. Ph.D. in Physics 1950 from McGill University, QC, Canada. Executive Director of Communication Sciences Division, Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, USA. Retired 1979.

George Elwood Smith, US citizen. Born 1930 in White Plains, NY, USA. Ph.D. in Physics 1959 from University of Chicago, IL, USA. Head of VLSI Device Department, Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, USA. Retired 1986.

Last year, the prize in physics went one half to Yoichiro Nambu, Enrico Fermi Institute, University of Chicago, IL, USA 'for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics' and the other half jointly to Makoto Kobayashi, High Energy Accelerator Research Organisation (KEK), Tsukuba, Japan and Toshihide Maskawa, Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics (YITP), Kyoto University, Japan 'for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature.'

The Nobel Prizes are awarded for physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, peace, and economics. The first five prizes were instituted by the Swedish scientist Alfred Nobel through his will in 1895. With the exception of the peace prize, which is handed out in Oslo, they are all handed out in Stockholm at an annual ceremony on 10 December.